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Starting out, Rick Goodemann was a Minnesota construction worker hired to refurbish a dilapidated building that had served as low-income housing for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He remembers feeling a sense of waste in hammering away at a project that should have been properly built in the first place but, because of poor design, had disintegrated into disrepair. Further frustrating him, the houses hadnft appreciated for the buyer nor become an asset to the community. Instead, he said, he was merely putting a Band-Aid on a bigger problem. The experience motivated him to get involved in local planning boards. Recognizing that developers had created high-end gated communities with highly e‡cient use of space and materials, Goodemann thought of applying similar design elements to affordable housing when he helped launch the Southwest Minnesota Housing Partnership, a nonprofit community development agency, in 1992. An early student of environmental products, he also...